Opposition Finds Apathy Over Election in Russia City

Published: April 12, 2012

ASTRAKHAN, Russia — Yulia Morozova did not vote for Oleg V. Shein, the opposition politician who has waged a four-week hunger strike
to protest alleged ballot fraud in last month’s mayoral election here. But Ms. Morozova once worked at a polling station and said she did not trust the election results — no matter who was declared the winner.

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“Let’s say not quite honestly,” Ms. Morozova, 25, replied when asked if she had gotten a firsthand look at how ballots were counted. “I don’t think it was different this time.”

Mr. Shein, a member of the Just Russia party, insists that if the results had not been falsified he would be mayor of this regional capital in southern Russia, a fishing mecca in the Volga River delta, best known as one of the world’s major suppliers of caviar.

But if residents have little faith in the election system, they also seem to have little interest in Mr. Shein’s plight. Their indifference poses a major challenge for antigovernment activists from Moscow who have flocked south in recent days
to lend him support, and are hoping to use his case to build wider momentum for political reform.

Even as more organizers of this winter’s huge street protests in Moscow arrived here on Thursday — ahead of a protest set for Saturday afternoon —residents seemed not to care.

Aleksandr Kulbatsky, 45, a small-business man, said that he voted for Mr. Shein and believed that he won the race, thanks to strong support among retirees. But he said he had not attended any rallies to protest and had no intention of doing so.

“I work and I have no time for this,” Mr. Kulbatsky said. “I thought he would be the mayor, but it turned out this way.”

He added, “I am sure the elections were not fair.”

According to the official tally, Mikhail Stolyarov, a member of Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia party, won 60 percent of the vote, while Mr. Shein won about 30 percent. Mr. Shein said he had won a majority at polling places that used a new electronic counting system, but was overwhelmingly defeated in districts that counted by hand.

The source of voters’ apathy seems to be a combination of the mayor’s relative lack of power compared with regional and federal officials and a jaded expectation that elections in Russia are always rigged, one way or another. On Tuesday, regional prosecutors said they had fully investigated Mr. Shein’s complaints and found them insignificant.

On Thursday, at the urging of the Just Russia leader, Sergei M. Mironov, who arrived in Astrakhan from Moscow, Mr. Shein and his supporters softened their stance, and began drinking juice, though he said they would still refuse to eat solid food.

Mr. Shein said the decision was also in response to an announcement by the Central Election Commission in Moscow that it would review videos of ballot counting in Astrakhan that Mr. Shein says prove his case.

But later in the day after several of his supporters were detained in confrontations with the police, Mr. Shein said he had changed his mind and would have only water.

“I made a statement that we were ready to start the softening of the hunger strike and I had a drink of juice,” he wrote on his blog. “I was wrong. The gesture was not taken as a sign of openness, but as a sign of weakness.”

Still, even some of the government’s fiercest critics acknowledged the lack of local interest.

“We don’t see any great resonance here,” said the well-known anticorruption blogger, Aleksei Navalny, who has been in Astrakhan since Monday and has been saying for weeks that the main challenge for the Moscow-based opposition is to inspire action elsewhere in Russia.

Mr. Navalny said that there were historical reasons, and that the huge protests in Moscow had proved that a previously apathetic public could be shaken into newfound fervor.

“Southern cities like Rostov, Astrakhan, Volgograd — they have always been less lively because everybody here got used to the situation that the mafia rules everything,” Mr. Navalny said. “Everybody thinks that it’s impossible to change anything. But it should not be underestimated.” He noted that several hundred people attended a rally for Mr. Shein on Tuesday.

“Five hundred people at a rally was a rare thing in Moscow a year ago,” he said.

For now, however, Mr. Shein’s crusade appears to be generating far more attention in Moscow than in Astrakhan.

Mr. Navalny said a good-government group in Moscow called the Voters League had offered $10,000 to buy plane tickets for people who could not afford to fly to Saturday’s rally.

Artemy Troitsky, a prominent journalist and music critic, said that Mr. Shein’s case was important because it represented a wider pattern of injustice.